Thursday, July 13, 2017

In An Instant

I don’t know if you saw it, but I did. And somehow it
changed me.

I was sitting in front of my television watching America’s
Got Talent. It was close to the end of the show. A young man came out on stage
and introduced himself. He said he was a doctor. He said he practiced family medicine. When asked, he said his name was Brandon Rogers, that he was 29 years old, and that he wanted to sing. And then he started
singing a classic, Stevie Wonder’s “A Ribbon in the Sky.” The audience loved it. The judges, including Simon Cowell, loved it. I loved
it. His voice was beautiful. And then it was silenced and so was the television as the screen went
black and an announcement was made saying that on June 11 he
was tragically killed in an automobile accident.

The show ended and I got into bed, but I couldn’t stop
thinking about him. How lucky he was,
I thought, that he got to fulfill his
dream. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Not until I realized how
he’d changed me, not until I realized how lucky I was that I got to see him and to hear him sing - and that I was with him when he realized his dream.

"McCloe guides readers through her...1950s childhood…fac[ing] demons large and small…That keen sense of fear tinged with magical thinking pervades the book’s first half, and the author’s ability to bring the reader deep into the emotions of her childhood is its greatest strength.”